The Brutal Bigotry of Low Expectations

Bagehot has a properly righteous post lambasting teachers who complain that it’s too difficult to teach their charges to read and write and count properly.

A week later, a BBC Radio 4 phone-in programme, Any Answers, featured a pair of state school teachers, both with 30 years of experience, again pouring scorn on the dangerously “academic” bent of the English baccalaureate, and Mr Gove’s related desire to see a more rigorous syllabus in history, involving such things as learning a framework of important dates and events to give children a sense of the essential chronology of British and world history.

Such history is never going to be relevant to many pupils, one of the teachers said. What do you mean by relevant, asked the radio presenter. Well, they are from the Gameboy and computer game generations, they have short attention spans, she replied. You cannot just tell them things, you have to change the format every seven minutes or so—a discussion, then a bit of role play, and so on.

It was then that I heard something that really made my hair stand on end. Arguing that it is just not reasonable to teach all pupils “academic” subjects like the maths and English GSCE examinations, a veteran teacher said: It’s like running a four minute mile. You could give me all the coaching in the world from [the former champion athlete] Linford Christie*, and I would not be able to do it.” For good measure, she said that all league tables are useless, as the only thing they capture is the socio-economic status of parents.

[L]et us be clear about what is being proposed here: telling parents whether their local school equips children with basic levels of literacy and numeracy. If British teachers think that unrealistic, because basic numeracy or literacy is beyond children from less affluent households, then I would humbly suggest they switch profession before they wreck any more young lives.

There are many, many, many fine and dedicated teachers. But speak to any teacher you know and I’ll bet that they’d be wearily familiar with the attitudes highlighted by Bagehot here. This is not a structural problem, it’s a cultural difficulty and unless you change the culture of teaching all the structural changes in the world won’t help you much.

Or, to put it another way, the point of Michael Gove’s structural reforms to English education is to make it easier to change the culture of aspiration and expectation in our schools. That’s a worthy endeavour. I happen to think that choice and competition are good things but it has to be admitted that changing systems or structures is not, in the end, enough. They are a means to an end not enough of an end themselves.

And in schools it starts with the top. Experience shows that headteachers can have transformative effects on almost any given school, regardless of its circumstances or intake. But they need the power – that is, the freedom – to do it. In turn this also means that local solutions – ie, those for an individual school – are not scaleable or easily replicated. That’s frustrating for mandarins and boffins who seek system-wide solutions but it’s also unavoidable. (See this Megan McArdle post for more on this. She’s talking about healthcare but the principles are much the same.)

So systems and structures matter but mainly to the extent that they permit experimentation, diversity and give good people and staff the opportunity to flourish. Finding those good people is another matter altogether and so, naturally, is getting rid of those teachers who have given up on their pupils.

*Since Linford Christie was a sprinter he wouldn’t be the chap I’d ask to train me to run the mile. A bit like hoping your history teacher can also teach you physics…